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5 gifts on every club’s wish list this holiday season

5 gifts on every club's wish list this holiday season

‘Tis the time of year when we put together those holiday wish lists. In the spirit of the season, we thought we would share 5 enchanting gifts that every club we know would love to receive.

Enthusiastically connected members

Enthusiastically connected members power the success of any club. Building and maintaining these connections is crucial. That means providing an excellent experience when members are at the club. But it mustn’t stop there. We also need to go outside the club to meet them where they are—online, specifically on their smartphones.

We must provide them with useful functionality, timely reminders, and an intuitive experience that allows them to extend their connection to the club beyond the physical grounds. This is why the member app has become such an essential part of any successful club.

A member app can make things more convenient for your members. Whether they want to book a tee time, make a dining reservation, sign up for a class, order food on the go, or pay a bill from their phone. The app makes it easy.

Plus, the app can simplify planning a get-together with your club friends. For example, Northstar’s member app offers a buddy list functionality that helps members easily organize an outing at the club.

The app also allows you to send targeted push notifications to keep members updated on everything happening at the club. Through its dynamic feed, you can share important announcements, promote upcoming events, and encourage interactions.

All of these features energize members and help them feel more connected to the club even when they are not at the club.

Passionately engaged employees

Empowered employees are a gift to any operation. In fact, they are the backbone of any successful club. Smart clubs know that building this empowerment is the key to everything from improved operational efficiency to an elevated member experience.

One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to launch an employee app at your club. With an app like Northstar’s, employees have the much-desired ability to manage their own schedules right from the app.

Moreover, it can streamline work, allowing employees to create reservations and bookings right from the app.

The app also enhances employees’ ability to personalize your members’ experiences. Through the app, they can see who is at the club, who is seated in the restaurant, and even access members’ profiles.

To top it off, your employees can use the app to access BEOs, pull up powerful club analytics, and more to help further optimize operations.

By providing employees with a new tool to do their jobs efficiently and effectively, you can boost morale, reduce turnover, and improve overall job satisfaction.

Conveniences that surprise and delight

Nothing improves member satisfaction like making it easier for them to enjoy the club. And nothing helps you accomplish that like a smart website solution that makes your site as functional as it is beautiful.

A modern solution can incorporate the ability to make online reservations a snap. Whether it’s getting a tee time, setting dining reservations, or signing up for a class or activity. Plus, it should offer e-commerce functionality to sell merchandise from any of the club shops online.

Another convenience is the ability to set up a member portal through which members can access their accounts to check charges and minimum balances, pay bills, and more.

Having all this conveniently accessible online improves how members view the club and how it caters to them.

Finally, a smart website will also make it convenient for you and your staff to deploy advanced marketing campaigns. For example, Northstar’s built-in tools allow you to segment your members by interests and preferences. And then send targeted email campaigns and notifications to keep members updated and engaged.

Unparalleled understanding

What club manager doesn’t have this one on his or her wishlist? In-depth operational analytics can provide a deep understanding of your club’s performance across various departments – from food and beverage to golf to fitness. That is valuable understanding you can use to improve your club significantly.

This is why Northstar has created NS Analytics. Every module in the Northstar system offers a rich set of NS Analytics reports as well as a set of KPIs and charts. This insightful data puts the information you need at your fingertips. The information that helps you get a clearer picture of the state of the club. And the opportunities at hand.

Northstar also offers member sentiment and behavior analysis data through Happometer. With it, you can track member usage patterns, preferences, and spending habits to identify opportunities for targeted marketing and personalized experiences.

With these advanced tools, clubs can make informed decisions, optimize operations, and improve the overall member experience.

Game-changing operational support

An optimized back-office operation is the gift that just keeps on giving. When everything is optimized here, it lays the foundation for creating an exceptional club experience.

Northstar recently collaborated with hundreds of clubs worldwide to understand how the back-office software could be improved to better serve the club. The result is NS Office. This exciting evolution gives you and your staff a system that is intuitive, powerful, and customizable.

A user-friendly interface delivers modern UX features like a mega menu and customizable shortcuts such as ‘favorites’ and ‘recents’ to quickly access the functionality you need, saving valuable time and reducing frustration.

A robust search function gives you quick access to the information you need – from member records to financial reports. Customizable reports provide valuable insights into your club’s operations, helping you identify trends and make more informed decisions. And there’s much more.

By rethinking how the back office software should function, NS Office helps improve the workflow, increase efficiency, and empower data-driven decision-making to boost your entire operation.

A holiday wish for your club

As you’re putting together your wish list for your operation, consider giving your club these 5 gifts. Gifts that can help ensure members are even more delighted, employees are even more empowered, and operations run smoother than ever. Of course, if you’d like to learn more, just request a demo.

May you and your club have a joyous holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

Best-in-class customer feedback: What it takes for Customer Experience Management

Best-in-class customer feedback What it takes for Customer Experience Management

It is a challenge to keep a finger on the pulse of the ever-shifting sentiments of members. Moreover, it’s too easy to form opinions based on a gut feeling or a few anecdotal member comments. That can lead to missing the signs of an underlying issue. Or missing an opportunity to make an adjustment that elevates the member experience.

This is why leading clubs are pivoting to a new breed of member feedback solutions. These solutions are raising the expectations for gathering and utilizing feedback in order to elevate the experience at clubs.

Happometer is one such solution. The company has developed a unique platform that goes beyond just collecting feedback to helping clubs manage the member and team experience.

“You’re going to be able to better understand that member journey through your club,” says Happometer CEO Imad Atalla. “And you’re going to be able to enhance the member engagement.”

There are three key areas that define this next generation of solutions and set offerings like Happometer apart.

Ease of Integration with Existing Systems

An advanced solution should integrate seamlessly with all areas of club operations. It should help you simplify the process by automatically and intuitively requesting feedback – whether that’s after a dining experience or after a member attends a club event and more. The request should be personalized. And it should make it simple for your members to provide feedback. For example, clubs have the ability to gather feedback via email outreach or through SMS (text messaging) with a system like Happometer. Furthermore, there is built-in intelligence to ensure that no member will ever feel overwhelmed by the number of requests for their feedback.

In the Happometer case, they go a step further specializing in the private club industry. This allows the company to understand and address the nuanced needs that clubs have when it comes to customer experience management, whether be it a member or team experience.

Actionable Insights

Intuitively gathering feedback is important. But just as important is what you do with that feedback.

The premier solutions give managers the ability to act. For example, the system will identify comments with a negative sentiment and send an alert to the general manager’s (or a specific department manager’s) streaming dashboard. Real-time access to the feedback means the manager can immediately take action, perhaps seeking out the member while she or he is still at the club to personally address the issue.

The system also provides the general manager with the ability to create an incident response case, assess the seriousness of the incident, and even assign a staff member to follow up with the club member.

These systems also deliver powerful analysis. This analysis can help managers uncover trends. It may be identifying a situation in the club before it becomes a problem. Or it may be uncovering offerings, practices, and even team members that are receiving positive reactions from the member population. This is the kind of feedback managers can use to help further nurture these positive experiences at the club.

Member Communication & Employee Engagement

A great feedback solution helps you build stronger engagement with members. Simply by asking for feedback, you are demonstrating to your members your dedication to optimizing their experience. You can then use that feedback to tailor your future communication, focusing on the things they have indicated as their priorities.

Systems like Happometer also recognize the crucial role your staff plays in creating a world-class experience. You can identify your top performers and ensure they are receiving the recognition and rewards that keep them motivated. Or, you could identify areas where your staff is getting overwhelmed, allowing you to make the adjustments. In a tight labor market, this heightened engagement helps you retain and even recruit the best team members.

Customer feedback has always been important. But with today’s advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, premier systems can help deliver a new level of intelligence, analysis, and insight. And, help clubs take their member experience to new levels.

“It creates eureka moments for club managers.” says Atalla, “Those moments can help managers transform their customer experience management.”

For more information on integrating advanced capabilities for managing the member and team experience, talk with a Northstar representative. Or, schedule a demo of the Northstar system, today.

The often-overlooked gem of Club Communications

The often-overlooked gem of club communications

Communication is key for your club. You could say it is the x-factor for retaining and growing your membership. After all, a smart communication effort can create a feeling of community. It can build a sense of belonging. And it can boost member engagement and Club Communications.

When it comes to your communication effort, the ideal approach is to allow your members to engage with the tool (or tools) they feel most comfortable using. This improves the potential of them receiving communications and engaging with you.

Of course, from a club perspective, we’d like to command their attention immediately – from virtually anywhere and anytime.

Does fulfilling our member needs and getting what we want sound like a bit of a pipe dream?

Not as much as you would think. What if we could have immediate access to them but do it in a way that feels familiar? In other words, a way that doesn’t require them to learn a new technology. A way that takes advantage of a tool they are already using. A lot.

What is this magical means of communicating? Texting.

What you need to know about texting as part of your club communications

Texting might not have the aura of a shiny new technology. But what it does have is familiarity. And ubiquity. Everyone with a mobile phone most likely uses texting in some manner.

You can benefit from that adoption and usage by including it in your member communication strategy.

The challenge for a lot of clubs is that adding the capability means adding another stand-alone piece of technology to your system. And then having to coordinate it with your other tools like email and in-app messaging.

When clubs do this, it creates more work as you have to dedicate time to yet another system. And it takes more effort to coordinate with existing channels. But what often goes unexamined is the inability to deliver more relevant messages. Since it is a separate piece of technology, you most likely can’t tap into the member preferences that exist in a separate CRM system.

Furthermore, you may not have the opportunity to integrate any ongoing analytics from your texting campaigns with other channels – like your email efforts. This results in a communication effort that can feel disjointed and leave you without the data to make decisions about future campaigns.

The key is robust integration with your club management software

Having your texting function (along with other communication channels) integrated into one system will save you time and effort. More importantly, having all these channels operate on the same database gives you the ability to segment members by preferences or behavior. For example, say you want to send a message out about a golf event and you want to target it to those in your database who play. Easily done if everything is integrated. Or say you want to send out a special offer at the restaurant to those who have been infrequent visitors. Again, easy to segment and send if you’re operating off of one database.

Of course, as your members engage with your texting efforts, all that behavioral data goes back into the database. This helps you build an even deeper profile of each member, allowing you to further customize communications and even set the stage for developing predictive campaigns in the future.

Not all club management software solutions deliver this kind of integration. So it’s worth the effort to find an offering that can help you coordinate your efforts across all the popular communication channels that your members use. And especially help you take advantage of texting and the unique position that it holds in your members’ lives.

If you’d like to learn more about how to take advantage of an optimal texting solution for your club, request a demo of the Northstar club management software system. You’ll discover how texting technology integrates into one complete solution, operating on one database to help you maximize how you reach and engage your members. Request your demo, today.